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Lot essay

Claire Durand-Ruel has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
After choosing what would become his home for the next twenty years, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son, Lucien, in March 1884: "yes, we have decided for Eragny on the Epte [near Gisors]. The house is wonderful ... with garden and fields. It is about two hours from Paris. I found the country much more beautiful than Compiègne, ... But here comes the spring, the fields are green, outlines are delicate in the distance ..." (J. Rewald, Camille Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, London, 1980, p. 58).

In 1890, the year before the present oil was executed, Pissarro worked on a series of watercolours en plein air which captured the landscape around Eragny looking over the uncluttered meadows towards Bazincourt. Many of these were annotated with the weather effet. It would appear that the immediacy of working with watercolour convinced Pissarro that he should abandon his arduous Neo-Impressionist technique in favour of a working method which was certainly still painterly but also much more free. This enabled him to capture such fleeting light effects as morning mist and sunbursts through cloud. Many of his most dramatic paintings of the period are his tremendous sunsets, of which both the present painting and lot 16 are fine examples.

Cataloguing & details

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Provenance

The Artist, and thence by descent.
Pierre Deucher, Paris, by whom acquired from the above circa 1900.

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Please note that this painting has been inverted in the catalogue illustration. For a correct image of the work, please refer to the department.

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